The pillows used by the ancients are not only varied in materials, but also varied in shapes: rectangular, ingot-shaped, animal-shaped, human-shaped, etc. The carvings and patterns on it are also colorful, including landscape paintings, mascots, animals, flowers and trees, poems and even erotic pictures. Every dynasty has its own characteristics.
The ancient pillows we see now are basically hard materials, which modern people cannot imagine. This is too scary, affecting comfort! Yes, the ancients thought the same thing as you, so they used cotton pillowcases! Now all the pillows we see in museums can be called "naked pillows", just like bare metal, just a dry pillow. After all, the cotton silk pillowcase that was once wrapped outside the pillow can no longer be kept. After hundreds or thousands of years, they have weathered or decomposed.
And the health care function of ancient pillows. You know, most of the health knowledge we know now is left by the ancients! The ancient people's health knowledge was not only rich in summary, but also slippery to use. Let's take a pillow as an example.
In addition to sleeping, the pillows of the ancients also have the functions of cooling, keeping warm and keeping in good health. For example, when the ancients fired porcelain pillows, they sometimes made them hollow at both ends or around, and hollow in the middle, which could be ventilated and cooled; Or make it hollow, and then leave some small holes on the pillow, which can be cooled by water injection. If you want to stay healthy, you can also put Chinese herbal medicine in it, which will become a healthy pillow. Is it witty? Of course, judging from the pillows preserved at present, many ancient people's pillows are too high, which is harmful to the cervical spine and is not "sit back and relax". So I usually use some high pillows to lie on my side, which is very chic and bohemian?
Pillows, as daily necessities closely related to people since ancient times, have gradually become a part of China traditional culture. When an ancient woman got married, she had to bring a hand-embroidered "mandarin duck pillow" to her husband's house. Many classical novels also mention that women will bring pillows when they cheat, which shows that pillows have evolved into an extension of ancient people's feelings. Moreover, the ancients believed that pillows, especially jade pillows, have psychic functions. Jade pillows, when people enter museums after death, can make their souls soar to heaven. I don't know if you still remember that in Love Through Time and Space, the originator of time-travel drama, the hero and heroine played by Xu zhēng and Zhang Ting traveled to ancient times and modern times respectively, and the journey was completed by the jade pillow buried with Prince Zhu Biao in the Ming Dynasty.
Nowadays, when we use pillows, we pay more attention to their comfort and health care functions. The pillow culture of the ancients has basically disappeared, but the wisdom of the ancients has been integrated into science and technology, which has brought the function of pillows to the extreme, continuously improved our quality of life, and truly "sit back and relax."